In light of cost control and competitive pressure, warehouses must make an effort to fill correctly and quickly the orders placed by the retail stores. The manual selection of goods ordered by the retail stores is not only time-consuming but also prone to human errors. The daily operations of the warehouses can be streamlined by the automatic goods picking machine, which is particularly suitable for use in selecting pharmaceutical products, cosmetics, compact disks, video tapes, cigarettes, etc., which are generally packaged in boxes.
The U.S. Pat. No. 5,271,703 discloses an automatic order selection system, which is capable of responding to simultaneous order requests and composed of an A-frame having a plurality of goods placing areas. Located on each of the goods placing areas are a plurality of the boxed goods which are stacked together. Located under each of the goods placing areas is a goods discharging mechanism capable of discharging selectively the goods to a conveyer by which the goods are transported to the distribution cartons.
Such a prior art automatic order selection system as described above is defective in design in that the operation of the goods discharging mechanism is vulnerable to stoppage under the circumstance that the boxes are not stacked in an orderly manner, and that the stacked boxes are of various dimensions, and further that the boxes are not stacked uniformly in terms of height. In addition, an excessively large or tall pile of boxes in the goods placing areas is rather prone to give way to knock down the adjoining piles of boxes. In short, the efficiency of the prior art automatic order selection system can be undermined by the incidents described above.
Moreover, the prior art automatic order selection system is designed to operate under the circumstance in which a small quantity of various kinds of goods is to be processed. Such a process calls for the employment of the computer and the control device, by which a substantial amount of relevant data must be processed in order to complete the execution of the entire goods selection process. As a result, the operating efficiency of the prior art automatic order selection system is hampered by the fact that the data transmission speed is slower than the execution speed.